Final Assignment: A Promise Falls Novella Read Online Free PDF Page B

I’d been in, and I stayed on my feet. She trained her eyes on Chandler.
    ‘I was on your side at that meeting,’ she told him. ‘I think students must be allowed to use their imaginations, to write from the heart, to explore ideas that others may find unpleasant, to push the boundaries. That’s what good writers do. I didn’t see what you’d written as evidence of some kind of mental disorder or anything like that.’
    I felt we were all waiting for a
but
.
    ‘But,’ Lucy said, ‘I did see evidence of something else.’
    She pulled her purse around in front of her, opened it, took out some papers. ‘These are a few of your reports from other classes, other subjects. Samples of your work.’
    She held them on her lap, made no move to distribute them. She seemed to be holding onto them as though they were grenades that might go off seconds after they left her hands.
    She looked at Chandler.
    ‘Is there anything you’d like to say about your story that you haven’t revealed to us so far?’
    Chandler seemed to be squirming beneath his skin. He was a mouse backed into a corner, looking for a way out and not finding one.
    ‘Answer the lady’s question,’ Malcolm Carson said.
    Chandler took a deep breath, let it out slowly. ‘Okay, so there is something I kind of didn’t tell you.’
    We all waited.
    ‘I didn’t want to get in trouble,’ he said. ‘And I didn’t want to get anyone else in trouble.’
    ‘Go on,’ Lucy said.
    ‘I guess I sort of didn’t write it.’

Seven
    ‘You plagiarized it?’ Malcolm asked.
    Chandler shook his head violently. ‘No! I didn’t do that. I would never do that.’ He paused. ‘But someone else wrote it for me.’
    ‘Who?’ I asked.
    ‘Joel Blakelock,’ he said.
    Lucy and the Carsons couldn’t have looked more surprised if the boy had told them Ernest Hemingway had come back from the dead to do his homework.
    ‘Chandler,’ Lucy said skeptically, ‘you can’t be serious.’
    It took me a second to remember that Joel Blakelock was the kid Michael and Chandler had photographed making out with another boy, and then posted the photo on social media.
    ‘Honest,’ Chandler said. ‘He wrote it.’
    ‘Wait, I’m not getting this,’ Greta said. ‘You somehow got hold of a story Joel had written and passed it off as yours?’
    ‘The last part, yeah,’ he admitted. ‘But I didn’t steal it or anything. He offered to write it for me.’
    We all exchanged looks at that point.
    ‘Why would he do that for you, after what you did to him?’ I asked.
    ‘It was a kind of peace offering,’ he said. ‘Like, I guess he knows I’m not the best student in the world.’
    He waited a second, maybe hoping someone would offer to contradict him, but when no one did, he continued. ‘I’m not that good at getting assignments in, and I haven’t been doing that good well in Ms Hamlin’s class, so he offered to write a story for me that I could hand in. And in return, Michael and I would leave him alone and never make fun of him again or anything. I mean, we weren’t going to anyway, because we got in so much trouble, but if he wanted to write something for me, I wasn’t going to say no.’
    ‘Did you tell him what kind of story you wanted?’ Lucy asked.
    Chandler shook his head. ‘I didn’t even look at it before I handed it in.’
    That explained a lot.
    I said, ‘Where would I find this Joel Blakelock?’
    ‘Hold on,’ Lucy said. ‘Who are you anyway?’
    ‘I’m a friend of the Vaughns,’ I said.
    ‘The way you’re asking questions, I wondered if
you
were from the police.’
    ‘I’m a licensed investigator,’ I said. ‘All I’m trying to do now is get to the bottom of this.’
    ‘Well you’re not talking to Joel without me there.’
    The way she said it, the subject was not up for debate.
    We decided to leave her car at the Carsons’ house and go to the Blakelocks’ in mine.
    ‘Joel’s a sensitive kid,’ Lucy Brighton said. ‘Someone like you